IBM unveils Heron quantum processor and new modular quantum computer

IBM continues to add to the quantum computing technology needed to make the revolutionary systems faster and more useful for innovative applications.

At the IBM Quantum Summit, it unveiled a modular quantum system called IBM Quantum System Two. The new system ties together Big Blue’s new Quantum Heron processors and a package of error-correcting software and tools. The combined technologies will provide the core components for large quantum computers for the next 10 years.

The Heron processor features 133 fixed-frequency qubits, which represents a 3-5x improvement in device performance over IBM’s current 127-qubit Eagle processors. “With Heron, we have developed a qubit and the gate technology that we’re confident will form the foundation of our hardware roadmap going forward,” Jay Gambetta, IBM Fellow and vice president IBM Quantum, wrote in a blog about the new quantum technologies. 

According to Gambetta, the IBM Quantum System Two is the bedrock for scalable quantum computation. At 22 feet wide and 12 feet high, the System Two features three IBM Quantum Heron processors. It combines cryogenic infrastructure with third-generation control electronics and classical runtime servers.

“IBM Quantum System Two is the modular-architecture quantum computing platform that we will use to realize parallel circuit executions for quantum-centric supercomputing,” Gambetta wrote. It’s all part of a roadmap to advance what IBM calls quantum utility.

“As we continue to advance how quantum systems can scale and deliver value through modular architectures, we will further increase the quality of a utility-scale quantum technology stack – and put it into the hands of our users and partners who will push the boundaries of more complex problems,” said Dario Gil, IBM senior vice president and director of research, in a statement.

Quantum computing excels at solving large, data-heavy problems, and future applications are expected to significantly advance areas such as AI and machine-learning in industries including automotive, finance, and healthcare. But among the bigger challenges quantum developers face are the noisiness of today’s quantum systems and the errors they generate.

“Standard classical error correction only needs to correct bit flip errors, where bits accidentally switch from 0 to 1 or vice versa. Quantum computers must correct more kinds of errors, like phase errors which can corrupt the extra quantum information that qubits carry,” IBM researchers stated.

IBM Heron brings a five-fold improvement over the previous best records set by IBM Eagle, IBM stated.

To that end, IBM has been developing Qiskit, an open-source quantum computing software framework that includes a wide range of tools and libraries for all aspects of quantum computing, from error-correction utilities and circuit definitions to quantum simulation capabilities.

This week, IBM said it is expanding Quiskit to include a new feature called Qiskit Patterns. 

“Qiskit Patterns will serve as a mechanism to allow quantum developers to more easily create code. It is based in a collection of tools to simply map classical problems, optimize them to quantum circuits using Qiskit, executing those circuits using Qiskit Runtime, and then postprocess the results,” IBM stated. Along with Qiskit Patterns, IBM announced the deployment of Quantum Serverless as beta for managed, unattended execution of Patterns at scale.

“Taking advantage of the composability, containerization, and abstraction provided by Qiskit Patterns, users can seamlessly create quantum algorithms and applications from a collection of foundational building blocks and execute those Patterns using heterogeneous computing infrastructure such as Quantum Serverless,” Gambetta stated. “This allows for targeted quantum acceleration of preexisting enterprise scale workflows and provides for abstraction away from quantum circuits and operators.”

IBM also said it will offer generative AI for quantum code programming through its AI platform watsonx. IBM will integrate generative AI available through watsonx to help automate the development of quantum code for Qiskit.

“Generative AI and quantum computing are both reaching an inflection point, presenting us with the opportunity to use the trusted foundation model framework of watsonx to simplify how quantum algorithms can be built for utility-scale exploration,” Gambetta stated.

Also at the Summit, IBM showed Condor, a 1,121 superconducting qubit quantum processor which features a 50% increase in qubit density, advances in qubit fabrication and laminate size, and includes over a mile of high-density cryogenic flex IO wiring within a single refrigerator.

“With performance comparable to our previous 433-qubit Osprey, it serves as an innovation milestone, solving scale and informing future hardware design,” Gambetta wrote.

In addition, IBM added a number of new goals for its long-range quantum computing roadmap that start with a target of Heron reaching 5,000 gates in 2024. The roadmap lays out multiple generations of processors, each leveraging improvements in quality to achieve ever-larger gate counts, Gambetta wrote. 

In 2029, IBM projects it will hit an inflection point: executing 100 million gates over 200 qubits with the IBM Starling processor and improved error rate processing softer, Gambetta wrote. This is to be followed by Blue Jay, a system capable of executing 1 billion gates across 2,000 qubits by 2033. “This represents a nine order-of-magnitude increase in performed gates since we put our first device on the cloud in 2016,” Gambetta wrote.